


Son of Sea and Steel

by heartbeatslows



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Future Fic, M/M, gruff mentor character tries not to love, no on-screen lesbians but the vibes are there, terfs need not apply
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:19:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22030153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartbeatslows/pseuds/heartbeatslows
Summary: Fifteen years after the events of Six of Crows, Kaz has control of the city of Ketterdam and Inej and her crew rule the seas.  However, when Inej's son comes to Kaz demanding his help freeing his mother from prison, Kaz is forced to tolerate this small, different version of the woman he loves.  And the kid doesn't know that Kaz knows he's hiding something.Written for the 2019 Grishaverse Big Bang.
Relationships: Jesper Fahey/Wylan Van Eck, Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Kudos: 136





	1. Prologue

Kaz held her in his gaze, his every sense taking note of her: he watched her like her actions were the last thing he would ever see. For once, he wasn’t watching his back, wasn’t waiting for some long-ago score to settle itself against him. For once, he was looking forward.

Inej tied her loose shirt around her waist, the billowing blouse of a seafarer, tied with the sashes of a woman who moved like the sea itself. She moved languorously, permitting Kaz his attention. She would be gone for longer than usual this time, and Kaz felt his mind spinning into a frenzy, wild ideas constructing themselves to keep her here. He could offer her crew another captain. He could take out all the slavers on the seas on his own, stamp out every injustice wreaked upon the waters. He could buy her things.

Finally, fatefully, Inej’s slender fingers withdrew from the ties of the fabric. Kaz took her hand in his, her touch on his skin so light as to be imagined. But for these and only these few days of a year that seemed to stretch interminably long, Kaz was not imagining Inej. He touched his lips to her knuckle, kissing each one, then kissing the palm of her hand, too. She came in closer to him, and he all but laid his forehead against hers.

“Come back,” he whispered, and he could feel the ache in his heart worsening, as though she had already left.

Her world was so much larger than him. She had her ship, she had her crew. She had her son. Kaz had Ketterdam, what it was and what he had made it to be, and the Dregs, but there was no other woman in the city.

“I will always come,” Inej whispered to him, her breath against his lips. “When I leave this city, I leave half of my heart.”

Kaz grabbed her hand tight. Half of her heart. The other half was on a ship somewhere, guarded by women with a fighting spirit born of brutality. He’d never seen that side, only heard about it. Ketterdam was his prize, and it was also his bride: he was beholden to this city and it to him, but Inej could never call Ketterdam hers so long as her mission went incomplete. That was what they’d agreed on; it was how they’d lived, now, for over a decade.

But Kaz nurtured his grudges, and in the night, when plans and schemes disappeared from his mind and she was all that remained, Kaz thought of the half of her heart that continued to drag her out to sea. The King of the Barrel didn't lose sleep over just anything. But this child kept Kaz awake long after the memory of his mother's touch faded from his skin.


	2. Bastard to a King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaz's life since Inej left Ketterdam.
> 
> …Inej left Ketterdam.
> 
> Right?

Kaz's lips were pressed thin, his hands clasped together and held in front of his mouth. His eyes were closed, and this was something new – he'd found that impulse these days, to speak by rote, and let his reputation and the violence of his gang do his intimidation for him. He pulled away from that instinct and opened his eyes, the sands of his irises unforgiving as the desert. In front of him, one more flash-covered Barrel "boss" stuttered his way through some feigned bravado, his lackeys with their eyes to the ground behind him.

"Explain it to me." Kaz cracked his knuckles and leaned back, his posture erect and his back not quite resting against the cushion of the chair. "You and your gang scrape yourselves together, think about trying something with a little more return than the simple tricks – "

"Tourists're getting too smart for that," Berend's lackey said, a wiry, toothless man in his early thirties with a wit too quick for his own good. "Had to find some other way to get by."

"Then maybe you ought get smarter," Kaz said bluntly. "In any case, you sought smoother seas and finer pickings near the fourth berth, didn't you? Started plucking some of {someone}'s pigeons. Is that right?"

Berend gulped.

Kaz let the gang – if they could call themselves that – remain in front of him for another moment. He could eke some joy out of it, he supposed: the furtive glances between one another, the way a few of the younger members looked to their boss like he was supposed to save them. Pathetic. The twenty or so of them were all new to the scene, most of them new to the city, except the one in charge. He'd heard the rumors Kaz had allowed to persist, about the riches that could be wrung out of the city with a gang behind you.

In reality, prospects weren't what they'd always been in Ketterdam. Sure, people were still rich. But the city wasn't the lawless land it had been when Kaz was coming up. Edicts went forth, silent tips between members of lesser groups about what was up-and-coming, and what was strictly off-limits. To give the city proper governance would be to choke it of its soul, and Kaz liked to watch the way canal rats fought between one another when no cats were around to stop them. There was order in Ketterdam in a way there never had been. But that didn't make the city clean, and it didn't make it safe.

But this, this was too easy, he thought for the hundredth time as his eyes passed dispassionately over each member of the gang – he'd nearly forgotten their name. Black Dragons. Presumptuous, for two dozen overgrown children with their scaly tails between their legs. The only of his own people in the room with them was Anika; as lieutenant, she was privy to whichever of his consultations she was interested in observing. She'd teased that she was only going to watch this one to find out why he'd deigned to bring this ragtag group of aspirants to the Barrel's finest club at all. Kaz found himself wondering the same thing.

"Gentlemen. Pull yourselves together."

They froze, the lot of them sensing the shift in the air. _So easy_ , he thought to himself, as he laid his knuckled hands on the wood before him and assumed a mercher's businesslike demeanor.

"Consider it Ghezen's grace that I'm not going to send you scampering like the vermin that you are. Stay off my property. For now."

They gulped in breath, their spines starting to straighten themselves out again, their spirits beginning to rise from the earth. They couldn't quite grab their dignity as they got to their feet, however, though it was beneath them to notice as much.

"That's it?" the lieutenant said, suspicious, and Kaz wondered why it wasn't him in charge of the gang in the first place. "Nothing else you're going to do to us?"

"Did you have something in mind?" Kaz asked blandly. The lieutenant shook his head.

"You're dismissed," Kaz said. "Get out."

They scrambled for the door, practically falling over one another, some of them already whooping with relief – and the hint of self-satisfaction that made Barrel trash so uniquely resilient. Kaz racked his brain for the lieutenant's name; he'd barely thought to learn it before he pulled them all in here, but it came to him just before he and the boss slipped out the door. "Yellow."

He paused, turned, still suspicious. The boss, all but out the door himself, hung back as well, his own expression wary.

"I hear the birds are better down near the Golden Cradle." The boredom in Kaz's tone rung through his own ears, but this was the only important thing he'd said all day, and the lieutenant knew it, too. He nodded, tipped his hat as an afterthought, and left the room, the boss left stumbling after him.

Anika went back over and shut the door. The gang members had left it open in their departure. "Alright," she said. "Lay it out for me."

"Isn't it obvious?" Kaz asked. His cane was back in his hands, and his chin rested on his knuckles, the corners of his lips amused.

"No, I cannot," Anika answered. "Why waste your time with that crew? They're barely a gang. Just a bunch of con artists, and not even particularly good ones. They're no one. And now they'll be throwing their weight around 'cause they think they've got Kaz Brekker's blessing. What for?"

Kaz tapped each finger on his right hand on the the crow's head of his cane. A soft thud for each contact, counting down – one, two, three, four, five – before he lifted all five fingers and set them down at once. Six.

"What's at the Golden Cradle?"

"Competition from Yafia and Spats," Anika answered automatically. "But for poorer pigeons, barely any customers with real money. Nothing we care about."

"Spats is looking out," Kaz said. "You've seen the Black Aces up near Fifth Harbor. They're scouting out land for once they choke out Yafia. And she's backed against the wall with the _stadwatch_ coming for her loans."

"Yafia and the Blind Beetles will be done for within the year," Anika acknowledged. "So you sent the what's-it-calleds – the Dragons or something like that – "

"I believe it's 'Black Dragons,'" Kaz answered. "Far too good a name for a gang of crying children."

"Yeah, sure. So you sent them there to make trouble for the Aces? But Yafia'll have to scare them off too."

"She might," Kaz said. "Most likely, she'll let Spats showboat and run the poor reptiles out of the Barrel altogether, then take Spats apart when he turns around, fresh off his victory. Yafia's smart enough. Without the constant pressure from the Aces, she'll be able to pull her gang together and make some money. Enough to make a down payment on her loan, at least."

"If that furshlugginer gang's got one thing going for them, it's size," Anika murmured. "Probably manage to give the Aces a good distraction." She shrugged. "Okay. Good enough plan, I guess. If it's worth the damage to our reputation to even have those fools within our walls."

Kaz waved it off. Barrel bosses were obsessed with only initiating relationships within a certain echelon, and by and large, Kaz followed the same. It didn't make sense to bring everyone he wanted to manipulate up to his office, when he had so many underlings to deliver his messages for him. People like Anika, or the gang leaders he had in his pockets, each of them paid for with that sweetest of currencies. However, it wasn't a hard-and-fast rule, and he'd found himself bored enough to invite Yellow and what's-his-name into his office. The streets were quiet these days. No one wanted to make trouble with the King of the Barrel.

"That lieutenant of theirs might start to get ideas," Kaz murmured. "And if he does, I'd like to know about it before it happens. And before the month after, when Vasye tells me it happened."

Anika smirked a little. "Vasye's a perfectly decent spider," she began.

"That's the problem, Anika," Kaz answered. "You'd be hard-pressed to find a _decent_ member of the Dregs. I'm not interested in bringing up our credibility."

"You've been spoiled," Anika teased. "Not everyone is Inej."

_No one was_ , and that was the problem. Kaz was about to open his mouth to say that they shouldn't have to be, that the Wraith couldn't be the only person on the island who could do their jobs, when he felt something.

A presence. Like warm breath on his neck slowly curling into a stream of cold air, like the eyes of an owl as it craned its head to follow you. It tugged at his edges, waiting – wanting something.

No one like Inej indeed.

Kaz clasped his crow's head cane tighter in his grip, then reached calmly for a pen on the table.

"Alright, Lieutenant." He rasped, throat dry, and cleared his throat. "Out. I need to get started on the books."

Anika scoffed a little, but she made her way for the door anyway. "Going to moan about your lost Wraith?"

"About my lost deputy," he answered, "found hanging from the Crow Club window bleeding out her apology."

She grinned a little at him, and her laughter carried her down the hall until the door she'd swung behind her clicked closed, and the false stillness filled the room again. Kaz inked his pen, leaned over the desk, and started writing.

He leaned to the right just as the implement sailed past him, leaving a wide berth between where it landed on his desk and where his head would have been. He saw in an instant that it hadn't been meant to kill him, only to startle him a little, but it hadn't quite managed that. Kaz's assailant was quiet up in the high rafters of the office. There wasn't a creak in the wooden beams, and no more weapons came down – particularly not when Kaz flicked his wrist and loosed a shucking knife behind him and into the wood above

Only then did whoever loomed among the beams falter, skitter forward, and expose themselves once and for all. Kaz looked directly up, and Suli eyes met his own.

His first thought, splashing him over with pure relief, was that it wasn't Inej. He had no idea why the Wraith would want to kill him from behind when if there was anyone who could catch him unguarded in a room alone, it was her. But this person felt so much like her, so silent, so demanding, a feeling like the choking scents that came off the canal. As the figure jumped from beam to beam, its body gripped the beams and kicked hard like swinging the trapeze. Not his Wraith. They centered themselves on the awning just above the door.

The shape was still enough. But there was a rocking in their spine, something that couldn’t help but shift against the winds in the upper slats of the building. When he squinted, Kaz could see it: his ankle dangling below the bars, rising and falling in an easy rhythm, like the beating of the sea against the shore.

"Child," Kaz said, his teeth clenched, his raspy voice soft with fury in his ears. "Come down."

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the 2019 Grishaverse Big Bang (shout out to the Council of Tides!)
> 
> All thanks goes to my team, of collaborators, Tumblr users @intotheriverstyx, @inkwingart, @phy-be, and @someofgennie and @ethereal-magia on Instagram. You all are so talented and so much fun to work with. All my love, always!!


End file.
